Rita Fields: We Don’t Realize How Strong We Are
Rita Fields is an entrepreneur and the CEO of two companies: 313 Industries and Copper Phoenix Consulting. She has spoken at TEDx with her talk “How Eating From The Garbage Can Taught Me How to Lead“, which the lessons on leadership she learned from her journey of resilience and adversity.
Rita’s childhood was very difficult due to her mother’s mental illness. She ran away from home at age 17 to escape it all. Soon after she became pregnant and homeless.
Rita is one of the most resilient and humble people I’ve had the opportunity to chat with on the podcast. I have learned so much from her journey overcoming obstacle after obstacle and learning true leadership from her many professional roles.
In this episode, we chat about:
- Why she assembled her son’s crib so tight with a butter knife that it couldn’t be taken apart
- How growing up with a mentally ill mother shaped Rita’s life
- Her time living on the street and the lessons she learned from panhandling
- Why she had to eat out of the garbage can while homeless
- How life is a series of different trains transporting us from one station to the next
- Why she considered having her baby on the streets instead of going back home after living in a homeless shelter
- Why she would sit in her driveway for hours, not wanting to go home to her marriage that was falling apart
- How her whole life had been working for one goal: don’t go back to the garbage can
- Why she felt like she was living her life paying homage to fear
- Our mutual dislike for the standard greeting question “What do you do?” and the prevalence of this question on television shows like Ellen’s Game of Games
- Why she sought to get unplugged from the matrix
- Alternative ideas for measuring the impact of people
- Her advice on becoming an entrepreneur